A Treachery of Spies

by Manda Scott

  There’s a thatched hut ahead, set apart from the rest, and a door half open and—

  ‘Theo, please.’

  She turns, planting her feet. ‘He still has his eyes. Both of them. He isn’t blind, Larry. Remember that as you go in. He is not blind.’

  In the gloom, he sees Sophie first; slim, slight, dark-haired, knife-like features etched deep with lack of sleep and a desperate vulnerability that leaves her achingly fragile.

  By any means, she is not his first priority, but there’s an odd gravitational force that keeps his gaze fixed on her, so that pulling away feels like pulling out of a tight turn did in the old days, when his eyes became gimbals, floating through glycerine.

  Slowly, therefore, against the pull of the moon and the earth, he hauls his gaze from Sophie to the man on the bed. To Patrick.

  As if appraising a stranger, he notes that he has copper-red hair, cut short. That he is undressed. His arms are a mess of healing bruises in greens and pale lilacs, like tattoos on an ageing mariner. His chest is a lacework of unhealed savagery.

  His face …

  ‘Patrick?’ There’s something not right about the way his jaw sits, the pressure of his lips. This is not a man to say ‘Sláinte’ and swallow half a tumbler of Glenmorangie without pausing for breath, to tell a joke after, and then run up a mountain for the sheer hell of it.

  Sophie holds his hand. Or he holds hers. Their knuckles are green-white tense. He can taste fear or loathing on the air, sharp, like old cheese.

  Laurence says, ‘Patrick, it’s Laurence. I heard—’

  Tho!

  It’s a dull noise, but desperate. Thick. Uneven.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Tho! A hand, pointing. Shaking. Veeve. Ow.

  ‘Patrick … I don’t …’ He wrenches his attention back to Sophie. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Tears make shining trails down the sides of her nose, crawl to the corners of her mouth. She has to try twice before she can speak. ‘He’s asking you to go. To leave. To go. Now.’ She lets go of the hand she is holding, and stands up. ‘But I don’t think he means it. I’ll go. You should stay.’

  O!

  That one is clear enough. But not clear. Not clear at all.

  ‘I don’t … why is he speaking like this? What’s happened?’

  ‘He can’t speak. He can’t eat. He can’t drink.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Is it not obvious? Kramme cut out his tongue.’

  5 July 1944

  The three Jedburgh incomers wear uniform; that’s the first and biggest difference. The flash of buttons, of rank badges, gives a new air of purpose to the camp, but little else changes: between them, Fabien and Céline run a tightly disciplined unit and there is little that can be added. The Jedburghs are useful on the firing ranges, training the incomers to shoot, and they are three more sets of hands bringing in the materiel after a drop; but they are also three more mouths to feed, three more fillers of latrines, and no more inclined to dig new ones than anyone else.

  They can call more supplies from the sky: in this, Sophie’s imaginings were right. She was wrong in her fears, at least so far: Laurence Vaughan-Thomas has not yet shot her for treachery. He is quiet around her, and won’t come near the infirmary. He talks a lot with Céline, who is less edgy, friendlier. Neither of them mentions Sophie’s role as the Wild Card, or Kramme’s telegrams, and it’s not as if there is a lack of opportunity.

  In the first days after his arrival, she lies awake, braced for a voice in the dark, for his pistol by her head. When it doesn’t come, she thinks he is too shocked by Patrick. Then she thinks he has forgotten. By the day of Daniel’s news, she has begun to think he just doesn’t care.

  And Daniel’s news is big. ‘Kramme’s back!’ He is the go-between with one of Céline’s contacts amongst the wives of the Milice. ‘Kramme ate dinner at Jacquot’s last night!’

  So Kramme, who has not been seen since the raid on the Hôtel Cinqfeuilles, has returned. Nobody knows why, but then nobody really cares. Daniel tells Céline, who passes the news to Paul Rey, who careens up the hill on a ‘borrowed’ Boche motorbike and tells it, mouth to ear, to Laurence, who shouts it to Toni Gaspari, who is on his way back from training the latest recruits and tells it to Sophie, who brings it, precious, warm, to the Patron as he lies in his bed in the infirmary.

  ‘Kramme’s back in Saint-Cybard. We can get him now.’

  The Patron neither smiles nor cheers. He stares through her, as he has since Laurence Vaughan-Thomas pushed his way into her infirmary and broke apart all the good she had done.

  She has no idea what was said in the ten minutes when she left them together, but the Patron is a dead man breathing. He will eat what he is given, he will drink – he is, in many ways, a perfect patient, better than he was before – but he will not speak to her, or to anybody. It is like nursing a corpse, and it is killing her.

  She is not, evidently, alone in this. ‘Did you hear the news?’ Laurence Vaughan-Thomas runs up the hill towards her. She thought she’d never see him here again.

  ‘Just now.’ She is back outside the infirmary, drinking something hot that she will not dignify with a name. The morning is cool, flavoured with smoke, bright and beautiful.

  ‘Did you tell him, the Patron?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘No response?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think this has gone on long enough. I’m sorry he took badly to my coming, but I’m here now, and it’s time someone spoke to him in a language he understands.’ He strides past her, and she hasn’t got the speed to stop him. In all honesty, she’s too bone weary to fight either of them just now.

  The door closes with a finality that sets her teeth on edge. She wanders fifty metres down the slope and sits on a pine stump, listening, but Laurence speaks in his native tongue when her ear is attuned to French and she can’t make out the words. The tone is clear, though, sharply clipped, military in its inflexibility and lack of compassion. She thinks, that won’t work, but then she’s tried everything she knows, so maybe it will.

  A gap comes, when she hears the Patron try to speak, and then a question from Vaughan-Thomas, harsh. She turns to push her way back in, and finds the route blocked by Céline.

  ‘Trust him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If that isn’t obvious, I’m not going to spell it out for you, but you do not own that man. At some point, you have to let Patrick Sutherland make his own decisions.’

  ‘I did that. Look what happened.’

  ‘It’s not a single event, Sophie. Let him breathe, or you’ll lose him. We all will, and you won’t be the only one left grieving. He may love you, but others love him and they matter. Come away with me. Step beyond the mountain. We’re going on a jaunt. You’ll enjoy it.’

  ‘Kramme?’

  That earns her a laugh. ‘Not yet, we need to plan for him and we won’t get a second try. But even so, you need to come away from here. Killing’s in your blood as much as it is mine. Paul Rey’s coming, the Yank who makes eyes at you when he thinks you’re not looking. He may be an oaf, but he’s an artist with a Sten. You’ll enjoy it.’

  It is frightening, how readily she abandons the Patron, but Laurence is there, and she needs to get away.

  She faces death and deals it and finds joy in the killing and in the not-dying, and Paul Rey is far from being an oaf, and he is definitely an artist with a Sten. He is, in fact, a man in whose company it is easy to remember that life is for living.

  She comes back flushed and ebullient with her blood streaming thick as lava and her heart awake again. She drinks Calvados, gives Daniel, René and JJ a lesson in unarmed combat, and lets Céline trim her hair back to the short twenties bob that is their Maquis fashion.

  Her neck feels cool afterwards, an oddly liberating feeling. And it is with this new sense of the summer air pressing on her neck that she lifts a bottle of Calvados and a mug of the not-quite-coffee and step
s away from the big fire to one of its smaller satellites, where Paul Rey sits alone on an oak log.

  ‘Hello.’ The fire is behind her. She has some idea of how it lights her hair.

  ‘Hello.’ He lays down his bowl, empty. ‘The Patron needs help?’ He is so different from the English men. Their politesse is centuries old. His feels as if it is learned, and not yet quite polished. He is older, she thinks, than either the Patron or Laurence Vaughan-Thomas, but youth holds him, his language, his way of being.

  ‘Captain Vaughan-Thomas is with the Patron.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘So I came to you.’

  ‘I see. I think.’ He stands, slowly. She holds up the bottle she has brought. Wordless, he holds out his mug. When she pours, the light of two fires joins in the thin stream of spirit. Briefly, liquid gold flows between them.

  He stands, as if glued to the ground. She takes both mugs and sets them on the planed flat surface of the log. This close, he smells of fire smoke and sweat, of fake coffee and gun oil; of life and hope. She lifts his hand, slides her fingers through his. ‘I’m not Céline. I know that. If you’d rather I left, I will do so.’

  ‘What? No! No, no, no, no.’ The spell that held him drops away. He steps in to close the last space between them. The fabric of his battle shirt presses on hers. In wonder, his fingers thread her hair. ‘I thought you and your Patron …?’

  She and her Patron are not his business. She puts a hand on his chest and pushes him gently back. ‘Don’t think. Really. We may die tonight, tomorrow, the next day. Thinking is for staying alive. We don’t need it for this.’ She kisses him, and if neither savage nor white hot, it is full of the day and the killing and the pain of waiting, and it is true that they don’t need to think at all, except briefly, with urgency, of where they might go.

  She has not seen where the men go when the town girls come, but he has. He takes her hand, leads her, then lifts her and when he sets her down, the bed is of mosses on pine needles, and the stars light the sweat on his naked back, and he has ginger hair all down his chest, like the Patron’s, except that it is paler, and not ruined, and there are no bruises – well, not many, and none of them is likely to kill him.

  It may be that he has a wife. She doesn’t ask.

  Later, walking back up to the infirmary, she counts the bats patching the starry sky, and the owls summoning their young to feed.

  A shadow waits for her, sitting on the infirmary porch, and she thinks it is the Patron and is surprised at how tetchy she is, how the anger of weeks rushes in and is not readily laid aside, how much she hates Laurence Vaughan-Thomas for finding success where she has failed. How she hates Céline more, for being right.

  The shadow gains form, and she stops. ‘You?’ Her throat cramps. Not the Patron. It is Vaughan-Thomas himself, holding an empty bottle of brandy. She is not ready for this. Not now.

  ‘Me.’ He tilts it at her in a kind of salute. ‘Not him. Never again him. I’m sorry.’

  He is exceptionally drunk. She is not sober. She’s not sure what she is. She doesn’t want to have to think about it. Her heart folds in on its own chaos. ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘You may wish he was. Certainly he does.’ He pushes himself to standing, sways, belches. ‘I thought … I was arrogant. And stupid. He is all yours. I have done all I— All he will let me do. Ever.’

  He walks away.

  ‘Laurence!’ She catches him within a dozen paces, spins him, ungainly, to face her. ‘What have you done? What did you say?’

  ‘I told him to stop wallowing in self-pity. That he’s alive and he should be grateful for it and he can’t keep on hiding behind the damage of the past.’

  Wallowing? The tubes of her guts twist, awkwardly. ‘Was that this time, or last time?’

  ‘Clever girl. I always underestimate you. Must remember not to do that.’ He salutes her again, loosely. ‘Céline likes you, you know. She’s trying hard not to be jealous of you and Paul Rey, and not quite succeeding.’

  Does she smell of him? Is it written on her face? She snaps, ‘And you are changing the subject. Was it this time, or last time, that you told him he was wallowing in self-pity?’

  ‘This time. Last time, I tried to appeal to his sense of compassion, for himself, for the rest of us who care for him.’

  ‘What did he say? This time, not last time.’

  ‘He told me to leave and never to return. He was really quite vehement. And loud. Unambiguous. I am, therefore, leaving.’

  ‘You can’t leave. We need you. Céline needs you. Anyway, where will you go?’

  ‘Not the Maquis. Him. I have said I shall not inflict myself on him ever again.’

  He sits down, suddenly, a marionette cut off without warning. Rocking forward, he presses his brow to his knees, then turns his head sideways, laying his cheek flat, pushing his mouth out of line.

  She folds her arms and takes a step back: this man, she has no intention of nursing.

  He sets the bottle on the summer-hard earth, draws a ring around it with his forefinger, thinking. She begins to walk away. He calls her back, softly.

  ‘I am going to regret all of this rather a lot in the morning, but for now, while I am able to speak without self-censure, I will say that I give him to you without any of the usual half-cocked, mealy hearted platitudes. He is yours. He always has been. I was never in the running. I have always known that. It is important that you know it, too. I didn’t intend for our parting to be so … acrimonious, but it may be that it was necessary. Certainly it was unambiguous. I will stay until we have found Kramme and carved him into particularly tiny pieces, and then I shall leave.’

  He looks up, blinks her into focus. She thinks he is going to be very sick, very soon.

  She has to say something, and doesn’t know what. ‘I care for him.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t love him.’ It may be that she pities him, which would destroy him, so she doesn’t let herself think it. Beyond that, her heart is a bruised mosaic, a lump of coal with too many facets to count, so that she has no idea what she feels, except that all of it is too much, and threatens to overwhelm her.

  Of only one thing is she sure: she loved in Paris, and she is not planning to do so again. The hurt is too great. She said these exact words less than an hour ago to Paul Rey, who didn’t believe her.

  Laurence Vaughan-Thomas doesn’t believe her, either. ‘I think you feel more than you let yourself know, and it is not all guilt. Did you love Kramme?’

  ‘No!’ Lust, she will allow. Never love. ‘I hated him then. I hate him now.’

  ‘But you made it your truth and he, by all accounts, loved you.’

  ‘He wanted a mother for his children.’

  ‘I gather he proposed to you on the night the invasion was announced. And you accepted.’

  Oh, God. ‘I …’

  ‘You did what you had to do.’

  ‘You don’t know what I did.’

  ‘I do, actually. We have a man on the inside who has told us quite a lot of what was going on. Not all of it, but enough to paint a picture. Name of Icarus. Might mean something?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good. Because at some point, you and I shall have to get him out. Or her. It might always be a woman, but I believe not. There can’t be two like you in the whole of France, I think.’ He pushes himself to his feet, makes a full, unsteady bow. ‘You are really rather wonderful. Céline’s loss is Patrick’s gain. Now go to him, and see if you can undo the damage I have wrought. I am truly sorry.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ORLÉANS

  Sunday, 18 March 2018

  19.30

  ELODIE DUVAL IS still missing. So are Laurence Vaughan-Thomas, René Vivier and JJ Crotteau. The difference is that Picaut has phone numbers for these three, and not for Elodie. They are burning a hole in her phone, but Eric sent her a text asking her to drop by and she’s not inclined to blow him off, so she has come down to the pathology su
ite, where Pierre Fayette is lying naked on the table, opened and stitched up again, neatly.

  Now that she can look at him without the Lakoffs on either side, it occurs to her that he is fitter than she might have thought: less flab, more muscle. More tanned, too: he didn’t look the kind of man who would lie on a sun bed.

  Eric is talking to her again as if nothing untoward had happened. He hands her a mug of coffee. She says, ‘Thank you. I’m sorry. Thank you.’

  He says, ‘It’s fine. Don’t worry.’

  Which is enough, really. She leans back on the wall. ‘What did you want me to look at?’

  ‘The red silk scarf you found at the site of the second murder.’ He sends an image of it onto the big wall screen. Laid flat on a white surface, it looks less exotic than it did hanging on Pierre Fayette’s back door. A second image joins the first: the scarf under UV light, where it becomes strikingly piebald. ‘Blood stains?’ asks Picaut.

  ‘Washed-out blood stains.’ Eric’s pointer circles them one after another. ‘Many, many washed-out blood stains, and some of them very old. We’re struggling to get useful DNA from any of them, but either this was worn by a lot of very unlucky people or someone used it to scrub up after a whole bunch of killings.’

  ‘Sophie Destivelle was in an assassination squad in Paris in the war. She killed a lot of people, apparently.’

  ‘But we have Elodie Duval’s hairs on here, not hers. Were they close, Sophie and Elodie?’

  ‘At Paul Rey’s bedside, they looked it.’ A thought strikes her. ‘Can I get an international line from here?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  She dials. The connection is slow, but it is picked up at the second ring. ‘Kochanek.’

  ‘This is Captain Picaut of—’

  ‘Captain! I was about to call you. You go first, and then I’ll share what I have.’

  ‘How often did Elodie Duval come in to visit Paul Rey in the company of the woman you knew as Theodora Sutherland?’

  ‘She never came alone. That is to say, over the past eighteen months, the two visited a total of thirteen times, and on each occasion, they came together. Madame Sutherland came a further twenty-one times unaccompanied. Do I gather that was an alias?’